In this week’s column, I teed off on the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s dangerously foolish ruling that you can copyright the workings of an application programming interface–a judgment that, if the Supreme Court somehow doesn’t toss it in the trash, will make a lot of reverse engineering illegal. I was not surprised in the least to see a few IP maximalists surface in the comments to contest my opinion, but I thought they would try to offer a counterargument more sophisticated than the likes of “this guy wants to make everything free.”

In yet another Q&A based on a relative’s computing travails, I explained how switching a WiFi network from 2.4 GHz to 5 GHz could end interference issues caused by a surplus of other WiFi networks and baby monitors but require adding a second router to ensure the same coverage as before.

I led off this analysis of the latest Apple v. Samsung verdict by suggesting that the only sure winners were the children of the patent lawyers involved, who could now count on having their college tuition fully covered. A reader countered in a comment: “As the spouse of a former patent litigator, I take issue with the first paragraph. The children of these attorneys do not win in this scenario. The hours spent on this case are hours these parents will never get to spend with their kids. So pretty much everyone loses.” Fair point.

Google’s imminent end of support for a protocol that let third-party Internet-calling apps hook into its Google Voice service meant I had to explain why advice I’d offered a year ago in my USAT column is no longer operative.

Notice the long, parenthetical paragraph starting with “Update”? That’s what you have to write when you leave significant, relevant info out of a story. Here, it was my failure to note that iOS and Windows Phone include text-message backup options that, while they don’t let you view old SMSes away from your phone, do at least ensure you won’t lose them forever if your phone dies. I did not think to mention them because I’d elected to focus the piece on ways to get text messages off of a phone–but, alas, I never thought to revise the question to specify that use case.

I talked about the intersections of travel and technology–from inflight WiFi to apps that can help guide your journeys–with guest host Christina Bellantoni and iStrategy Labs chief marketing officer DJ Saul. This was excellent timing, as I’d spent most of the twoprior weeks out of town. I do, however, regret missing a chance to rant yet again about the woeful state of the C/D concourse at Dulles.

I attended a pitch event for startups, Fortify Ventures’ Demo Day, and asked each of the five companies that presented there if they’d applied for any patents and what sort of exposure they thought they had to a patent-infringement lawsuit.

Once again, a problem with my own computer yielded the material for a Q&A item, which in this case doubled as an opportunity to question my own and others’ enthusiasm for cable-free computing. The column throws in a tip about how it’s easier to recycle rechargeable batteries than you might think.

I’ve been going to and occasionally speaking at the Future of Music Coalition’s annual summits since their debut in 2001. This year, I got a chance to interview the chief legal officer of the Swiss data-locker service RapidShare–a company that has gotten a lot of heat for enabling copyright infringement but says it’s working to stop people from employing it for that purpose. I had to condense my questions after Raimer took too long with his PowerPoint, but I did hit the points I wanted in the time I had left (beginning at about 13:50 in the clip below).

Back in 2008, candidates Barack Obama and John McCain put together lengthy, detailed descriptions of their tech-policy goals; this year, Obama and Mitt Romney barely mentioned the subject. This has been bothering me all year (earlier this fall, I unsuccessfully pitched an article along these lines to a couple of sites); in this post, I tried to outline where the absence of a campaign conversation on tech policy leaves us in three key areas.

I wrote this in part because e-mail security has been catapulted into the headlines, courtesy of the Petraeus/Broadwell scandal, but also because I thought it was a good idea to remind people that no technology measure can stop the recipient of your message from doing whatever he or she wants with it, while also summing up other risks to your privacy in e-mail. But I should have spelled out how encrypting your e-mail won’t close most of these vulnerabilities (even if most people can’t be bothered to try that).

This is the first Windows-centric piece I’ve written for USAT in a while. It leads off with advice about ways Windows 8 users can either replicate the program-launching functions of the Start menu or outright restore that feature (for what it’s worth, I will see if I can get by with filling out the taskbar with shortcuts to programs), then wraps up with a tip about Win 8’s helpful system-refresh and reset tools.

This list below shows me spending more time talking about my job than actually doing it, which isn’t really something to brag about. But I also filed one short piece for print that will hopefully pass muster with the editors involved. And if I hadn’t run into some technical issues trying out a new app, I would have had a post for Discovery here as well.

I discussed the smartphone-patent situation with lawyer and activist Marvin Ammori, American University law professor Jorge Contreras and George Mason University law professor Adam Mossoff, with Internet Caucus legal policy fellow Eric Hinkes moderating. InfoWorld’s Grant Gross wrote up the event and was kind enough to let a quote from me serve as the last word.

That link only points to an agenda page, not a recording or report of this panel I moderated at a marketing conference in Baltimore. But I assure you that we–meaning me, Mitch Arnowitz of Tuvel Communications, SocialCode’s Cary Lawrence, Kari Mitchell of HZDG and marketing guru Geoff Livingston–had a great discussion about the changing engagement of Facebook’s audience and how that differs from the crowd you might draw at Twitter, Pinterest or some other social network.

Once again, I was a guest on Gene Steinberg’s tech-news podcast–this time, with BetaNews editor Joe Wilcox. I talked about satellite Internet access and broadband access in general, the almost-guaranteed arrival of an iPad mini this week and Windows 8’s potential fit with consumers.

In this week’s column, I ticked off a few ways to spot a phony or parody Twitter account, from the lack of a blue “verified” checkmark to a sneaky use of the number “1” in place of a lowercase “l” in a handle. Then I share a tip about inspecting how often and in what ways you’ve interacted with Facebook friends on that social network.

I usually post this on Sundays, but a roughly four-hour delay in Frankfurt stretched my journey home from IFA to 19 hours. On the other hand, one of my regular weekly items got posted a day late as well.

I was delighted not to have my Friday evening wrecked by the need to blog immediately about the $1 billion Apple-Samsung patent verdict; instead, I could take a little time to read up on the case (including some good explanations posted before the verdict that I’d neglected earlier). And once I’d done that, the case looks less damaging to Android and Samsung than the first headlines suggested–even before you factor in the odds of appeals prolonging the case for years.

The gadget-porn trade-show photo gallery is bit of a journalistic cliche, but I like taking pictures and telling stories with them–even though it adds up to more work than cranking out 700 words of blog post and illustrating them with only one or two shots. Here, I picked out 10 highlights from the massive IFA convention in Berlin, including two that speak to key differences between gadget markets in the U.S. and the EU.

Did I mention that I have some gripes with the patent system? This post looks at a recent bill (with the obligatory cutesy acronym) that aims to make patent trolling a riskier proposition, then lists a few other patent-reform ideas from such longtime critics of the patent system as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Techdirt blogger Mike Masnick.

The weekly column, posted this morning instead of its usual Sunday-afternoon timing, covers two browser-specific topics. At the top, I explore the issues involved with using a non-Apple browser in iOS–including how that would be easier if Apple let you set an app besides Safari as your default browser. Then I explain how to selectively disable Flash objects in Google’s Chrome (yes, days after Discovery posted my Flash-required slideshow).